My name is Don White. I live in San Francisco, but am originally from Vancouver Canada. I am 37 years old and have been playing piano since age 5, sax since age 10. It certainly seems like there are a lot of IT people on this forum. I work as an account manager/technology consultant with Ernst & Young's internal IT department, selling technology solutions to internal clients and the various related companies that we have spun off in recent years (most recently our entire management consulting group).
I currently do not have any keyboards. My piano (a huge old upright grand) is at my mother's place in Vancouver. I sneak into the rehersal rooms at UCSF (where my wife is a faculty member) to practice a couple of times a week. I play at church, and jam occaisonally with friends in a jazz/blues oriented group, but other than that not much else. I am looking to buy a good 88 weighted key controller/piano so I can practice at home, but I would also like something portable enough for jaming or performance. I have played and like the sounds of both the Kurzweil PC2X and the Alesis QS8.1, but every month, (with 2 kids and a project of a home) the money seems to go elsewhere. My wife seems to think new windows are more important that my artistic expression this month. I still play my sax (a Yamaha alto) occaisionally - my 2 year old son get's quite a kick out of daddy's "snacks-a-phone".
I've played a bit with various blues/pop/R&B genre bands in Vancouver, mostly sitting in for missing, drunk or otherwise unavailable keyboard players. My rig in those days consisted of a Rhodes 73 and a Yamaha DX7. The Rhodes got dropped off a truck and I sold the DX7 years ago.
After 10 years of putting my musical ambitions on the back burner to build a career, I am now at a point where I am looking to get back into playing more regularly.
